The popular Phaser 6130, Xerox’s cheap and cheerful colour laser printer, is about to be replaced – enter the Phaser 6140. With colour print speed increased from 12 pages per minute to 18ppm plus the option of a duplex unit and additional paper tray, the 6140 is better equipped to meet the needs of a small workgroup than its predecessor.

Xerox have also beefed up the processor and doubled the memory capacity from 128MB to 256RAM. The first page out time has been reduced by up to four seconds in colour and two seconds in mono - an improvement that will probably be noticed by more users than the increase in overall print speed.

Other than a slight increase in toner capacity, little else has been changed on the 6140; the drivers, software, paper handling etc remain the same but Xerox is making much of its new printer’s green credentials. The Phaser 6140, according to Xerox, has considerably lower power consumption and produces 80% less waste than comparable laser printers. Consumers are increasingly aware of their impact on the environment when making purchasing decisions so the 6140 will no doubt attract a few buyers on that basis.

So far, so good – then we come on to the small matter of the price. The exact pricing is still to be confirmed but it looks as though the 6140N will be around £50 more than the 6130, while the 6140DN will be around £100 more. Fair enough, perhaps, given that the 6140 is faster and has a bigger memory than the 6130 and, of course, you’d expect to pay more for a duplex printer. However, there does seem to be a growing trend for manufacturers to replace old models with new ones that are faster, better and more expensive.

There’s nothing wrong with making improvements but sometimes customers don’t want or need a faster printer and they don’t want to pay extra for the privilege. In short, we’d like Xerox and the other manufacturers to remember that there will always be a demand for printers that are basic, uncomplicated and, above all, cheap.